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Even if the NSA was considering terminating these programs due to cost, that's not the same as terminating them because domestic surveillance exceeds the NSA's mandate. It's kind of like saying that we don't jail people for homosexuality because the prisons would cost too much: while the argument does end the injustice in the short term, it leaves open the possibility of it returning in a way that a moral argument doesn't.

That was exactly my thought. This is exactly how cell phones are jailbroken; I was actually quite disappointed that the article was purely from a security vulnerability standpoint as opposed to how I can root my player and make it allow skipping of the thrice-damned FBI warnings.

My favorite slashdot mobile ads are the ones that somehow autoload a play.google.com URL, causing the Play store app to come up unless you go through the torturous process of disassociating the intent Play comes with.

Yes, my argument against suspending due process and surrendering government to the "kill people" branch was just an outgrowth of my inner desire for a world where hunting people for sport was interrupted only by pauses to rape children.

Perhaps my position is more clear as a mathematical relation:

Martial Law < Imperialism < Modern Western Culture

Again, it's not good or desirable to regress to previous incarnations of our society. I am not even saying that nuclear holocaust would result in such a regression. I am simply observing that with less population, knowledge, and infrastructure than today, there was a society that did not require a military authority to maintain.

The Demon Conservatives of Slashdot are paradoxically both in favor of a powerful, racist, homophobic state clamping down on any free thought, and an anarchic, eternal war where gold is the only value.

While I do identify my political leanings as conservative, I believe that it is an individual argument, not the political leanings of the speaker, which should be addressed in debate.

As I said, I believe that life was better in the society of the past few hundred years than it would be under a martial law imposed with the power of a modern state. I do also believe that life is better under today's society is better than it was under Napoleon. It is this improvement that I referred to as the measure of our modern civil structures.

My experience with cyanogenmod had been that they can't do a release until the manufacturer updates, because the drivers are closed source and cm needs updated binaries. You might catch something when your device has compatible hardware with a nexus device or something, but otherwise cm is more "ditch sense/touchwiz/blur" than "get security patches".

We survived for centuries with the number of people and level of industrialization that would remain after a widespread, devastating war, without resorting to these measures. In fact, we have measured the society that this plan seeks to "protect" by the rights and freedoms that the average citizen has gained.

I don't know what "society" means to you, but to me it's the structure by which we all agree that other people exist and have rights; martial law means that society has already fallen.

For whatever reason, the summary chose to describe this bill in relation to a previous (failed) bill, rather than current law. The number that would have been meaningful in that sentence is the current cap; wikipedia indicates that it's 65,000, with caveats about a system of loopholes permitting an increasing figure over time.

We already have droves of graduates who can't find jobs because they paid for a degree with little useful application; now we'll have droves of graduates who can't find jobs because the taxpayer bought them a degree with little useful application. Why not, instead, train a generation to build things and to fix things by expanding the trade schools?

I think that saying "This piece of code is going to be called a lot, so I'll implement it in assembler" is inadvisable. The more reasoned approach is "after profiling, my program spends a lot of time in this routine, so I'll go over the assembler the compiler generated to make sure it optimized correctly". The upshot being, it is useful to be able to read and write assembler when optimizing, but it would be rare that you would produce new code in assembly from whole cloth.

However, I think they'll need to be more careful in accounting; otherwise a "popular" book that nobody actually reads may walk away with the lion's share of the income.

Fortunately for Amazon, the Kindle stores a terrifying amount of information about how you read a book. They could pay authors for the number of pages a reader spent more than a minute on if they wanted to.